The Perfect Father

by Penny Jordan

  Out of the corner of her eye she saw a car turning into the drive to the house. Her heart started to hammer heavily as she recognised it.

  It was Liam’s.

  Liam!

  What was he doing here? There was still another twenty-four hours to go before he was due back.

  Quickly she started to hurry downstairs, dragging open the heavy front door just as he reached it.

  The house, although not presently lived in, was cleaned twice a week but it still had that sad lonely air to it that unlived-in homes possess, Samantha reflected as she closed the door behind Liam and demanded shakily,

  ‘Liam, what are you doing here? You said you wouldn’t be back until tomorrow.’

  ‘I know but...you didn’t sound too good when we spoke and when I rang this morning and your mother told me that you’d left early to come over here, I decided to cancel the rest of my meetings and drive over.’

  ‘You cancelled your meetings because of me. ’

  Samantha looked at him in surprise. Although Liam’s ambition was more of the steely determined sort than the aggressive go-getting type, she was still surprised that he had been concerned enough to behave so impulsively.

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  ‘Your mother says you aren’t eating...’

  ‘I’ve got a lot on my mind,’ Samantha told him defensively. ‘I guess I just don’t feel that hungry. Liam...I...’

  She stopped and then took a deep breath, turning away from him so that she wouldn’t have to look at him whilst she told him, so that he couldn’t look at her and see the truth in her eyes, because she knew that if he did she couldn’t bear to see the corresponding pity in his.

  ‘I can’t go on with this... It’s got to end. The longer we leave it the worse it’s going to get. Mom’s already making plans for our wedding and Dad...’ She stopped and swallowed.

  ‘They’re going to hate me for us not getting married. I never realised...’ She stopped again. ‘We’ve got to tell them that we’ve changed our minds, Liam, and that it’s over.’

  He was silent for so long that in the end she had to turn round and look at him, but although she searched his face for some clue in his expression that would tell her what he was feeling and thinking she could see none.

  ‘It would never have worked out anyway,’ she told him, forcing herself to try to make a joke of it. ‘Can you really see me as a Governor’s wife?’

  ‘Yes, as a matter of fact I can.’

  Open-mouthed, Samantha stared at him, unable to conceal her reaction from him.

  ‘But you’ve always said how impossible I would be and...’

  ‘No. You’ve always said how impossible you would be,’ Liam corrected her. ‘And maybe twenty, even ten years ago you would have been right. The restrictions imposed on you to ensure my success would have been impossible for you to bear and such that no one would have PENNY JORDAN

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  had the right to want to impose them on you, but things have changed Samantha and are still changing.

  ‘We’re living in a new world, a world that’s coming to not just see but to welcome and embrace all manner of different kinds of thinking and all manner of different views. We’re a strong, braver people now, and we no longer feel threatened by new ideas or innovative ways of dealing with problems. The kind of Governor I intend to be would never have been tolerated a decade ago. The men and women we’ll be representing are people like ourselves, the men know that their roles have to be inter-changeable with those of their partners and, men and women alike, they recognise that the old style of a woman

  ‘‘standing by her man’’ has gone, that now both partners in a relationship have the right to expect support from the other, that both partners are equal and mutually supportive of one another, that a woman has as much right to expect her man to stand by her as he does her.

  ‘We’re on the threshold of a new era, Sam, and I predict that it’s one that will allow people to coexist in harmony as individuals and that the old straitjackets which required people to conform to certain rigid patterns will be swept aside as people overcome their fears and prejudices to accept one another as they are, to respect them as they are...

  ‘No, you may not have made a good traditional Governor’s wife, the kind that was always there two steps behind her husband and faded into the wallpaper, but that isn’t the kind of wife I’ve ever wanted. I want a wife who will be my partner in every sense of the word and she’ll be standing there right alongside me and sometimes I guess, right in front of me,’ Liam concluded, almost hu-morously.

  For a moment Samantha was too moved to speak.

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  Everything he had said had touched her so emotionally that she knew she was frighteningly close to breaking down and telling him exactly how she felt about him.

  How could she not love him now, after what he had just said.

  ‘Do the voters know about all this?’ she managed to joke shakily.

  ‘The voters have no role to play in my private relationship with you, Sam. Besides,’ he added quietly, ‘it may have been true that I did once think of you as a woman too individual by far to conform to being a politician’s wife, but I was wrong. It wasn’t you who needed to change your thinking but me who needed to change mine, and I have done, Sam. I don’t just love you, I admire and respect you, as well. There’s nothing about you I could ever want to change—not one single thing—apart, of course, from changing your name to mine!’ Liam told her in a slow smoky voice that made her stomach tie itself in knots and her heart turn somersaults inside her chest.

  Oh, why, why was he doing this to her...? Why couldn’t he just agree with what she had said and walk away from her?

  ‘Uh...but we don’t have a private relationship,’ she told him huskily. ‘It’s just pretend, Liam...it’s...’

  ‘Is it?’ he challenged her, and then the next minute she was in his arms and he was holding her, kissing her gently at first and then when he felt the soft tremulous response of her lips and the betraying shudder of pleasure that racked through her with a fierce hungry passion that had all Samantha’s objections dying unspoken. All she could do, all she wanted to do was to simply cling to him; respond to him, give him all the love in her that was burst-ing to be expressed.

  ‘If the voters can’t see what an asset you’d be, what a PENNY JORDAN

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  gift you are, then that’s their loss,’ she could hear Liam saying thickly to her as he cupped her face and looked down into her eyes with such a blaze of love in his that Samantha felt as though its heat was going to melt her right through to her toes.

  ‘And their loss isn’t going to be mine. Rather than lose you I’d step down from the race.’

  Samantha’s eyes widened. She could see in his eyes, hear in his voice, that he meant exactly what he was saying.

  ‘You’d do that... for me... ’ she whispered.

  ‘For you and for us,’ Liam told her softly. ‘If that’s the only way I can convince you that you mean more to me than anything or anyone else...’

  ‘Oh, Liam...’ Tenderly Samantha touched his face with her fingertips. ‘I guess that must mean that you love me,’

  she told him dreamily, her tears falling on his skin.

  ‘Just why the hell else would I come racing across the Atlantic like a complete fool,’ Liam challenged her gruffly. ‘Have you any idea what it did to me to hear you telling me that you were going to go get yourself an English husband...an English father for your kids...’

  ‘But I didn’t know. You never said.’

  ‘ You never wanted me to say,’ Liam retorted. ‘You treated me like...like I might have been your brother.’

  ‘That was because...well, when you first came to work for Dad you made it plain that you were strictly off limits and...’

  ‘You were still a kid...a baby...’ Liam interrupted her.

  ‘And then, later, when y
ou grew up, you just didn’t seem to want to know.’

  ‘I didn’t know,’ Samantha admitted, ‘not until...’ She stopped and blushed a little and then laughed. ‘I guess I 182

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  had to go to bed with you to find out just exactly what I do feel for you.’

  ‘Uh-huh... So it wasn’t just to get me to help you make a baby then,’ he reminded her.

  Samantha shook her head.

  ‘I guess I had to tell myself it was because I was so shocked by what I had done, but deep down inside I think I must always have known...have felt... That Sunday at the Grosvenor when all the family were there it felt so good, so right—us being together. I missed you so that night.’

  ‘Nowhere near as much as I missed you,’ Liam groaned as he took hold of her.

  As he started to kiss her she snuggled closer to him, eagerly responding to his rising passion, but then suddenly she pulled away from him and demanded softly, ‘Liam, is there really nothing you wouldn’t do for me...?’

  ‘Nothing,’ he responded. ‘Why, what is it you want...?’

  ‘Well, this time...’ She stopped and flushed prettily.

  ‘This time when we make love, could I have...could we...

  I want your baby, Liam,’ she told him.

  ‘Liam!’ she protested as he started to kiss her with dev-astating intensity, running his hands possessively the length of her torso, cupping her breasts and then pulling her so tightly into his own body that she could feel the powerful throb of his arousal.

  ‘What ever you want from me you can have, whenever you want it,’ he told her rawly. ‘But when it comes to making babies...’ He cupped the back of her head and massaged the flesh, looking deep into her eyes.

  ‘I think we both know that that’s something we want to happen after we’re married and not because of what anyone else might think but because we want our kids to PENNY JORDAN

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  grow up knowing that we loved and respected one another to want to give them that security.’

  ‘Oh, Liam...’ Samantha sighed blissfully as she melted into his arms. ‘Oh, Liam...’

  The house was fully furnished with beds in every room, but Samantha knew that, right now, it wouldn’t have mattered where they were, so compellingly and urgent was their need and their hunger for one another. Just the touch of Liam’s breath on her bare skin was enough to send her body into tiny shivers of almost orgasmic pleasure and as for his reaction when she touched and kissed him.

  ‘So, you want to hold out until we’re married,’ she teased him at one point, and in the end they both admitted it was a very near-run thing.

  Their wedding took place three weeks before her father’s official retirement and six before Liam’s inauguration as the state’s new Governor and, of course, during her father’s speech there were several jokes about him losing a daughter but gaining a Governor’s wife in the family.

  Later, when she stood next to her mother, her sister and her brother as their father received the thanks of the state officials for what he had done for the state and then, later still when she stood beside Liam whilst her father spoke of his pride in knowing just what Liam would achieve, she was filled with such pride for the man she had married that she felt that her heart would burst with it. But her most special memory of all as she listened to Liam giving his acceptance speech and discreetly patted the still flat smoothness of her stomach and whispering to their growing child to listen to its daddy, she was thinking not of the future but of the very special and private occasion when the baby growing inside her was conceived.

  ‘You’ll love it,’ Liam had insisted when she had made 184

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  a face and exclaimed in horror when he told her that their brief honeymoon was not to be in some idyllic tropical paradise, but a back-packing trip into the mountains.

  But the few days they had spent there had proved to be far more memorable than any luxury surroundings could ever have been, especially the first night they had made camp in the small secret glade Liam had taken her to right beside a spring-fed small mountain pool. They had swum there together naked, the water icy cold against the heat of their skin, and then they had made love beneath the stars with their benign silvery glow the only witness to Samantha’s soft cries of pleasure as their bodies merged together and created the new life she was now carrying.

  The whole family had come over for the wedding, every single one of them, including Bobbie proudly bearing her newborn son, and Samantha had noticed again how withdrawn and quiet Katie had been.

  ‘Jenny is very concerned about her,’ Ruth had told them. ‘She works so hard, too hard, Jenny thinks. I’ve suggested that she ought to try to persuade Katie to move back to Haslewich. They could do with her help in the family-run practice.’

  Samantha, who had seen the hopeless, helpless look in Katie’s eyes whenever they rested on her twin and her husband, wasn’t so sure that it was just hard work that was affecting Katie but she kept her thoughts to herself.

  The family suspected that Louise might be pregnant, but nothing had been said yet. Samantha couldn’t imagine anything worse than to love one’s twin’s man. She couldn’t imagine how she would have coped if, for instance, Bobbie and Liam had fallen in love. Just to have the thought form inside her head was enough to make her PENNY JORDAN

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  go dizzy at the thought of the pain such a situation would bring.

  James, too, had attended their wedding looking slightly sheepish and keeping his distance from her. Not that he had any need to do so, she had no right to demand an explanation from him for that kiss she had seen him and Rosemary exchanging. But Rosemary’s fiancećertainly did. Now Samantha looked across the room to where Liam was working at his desk and then got up and walked over to him, taking up a teasing provocative pose as she perched beside him, swinging the long length of her legs.

  ‘Well now, Mr. Governor, sir,’ she breathed sexily,

  ‘they say that power is a very sexy aphrodisiac and that powerful men are very, very sexy in bed.’ As she spoke she was reaching across and starting to unfasten his shirt.

  ‘Would you say that that was true...’

  Liam leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes and then teased her, ‘Well, I guess there’s only one way you’re going to know,’ before getting up and taking hold of her hand and asking her, ‘Have I told you today how much I love you, Samantha Connolly?’

  ‘Mmm...not since breakfast,’ Samantha responded.

  ‘Mmm... Well I do...and I always will.’

  ‘ Always... even when I’m hugely pregnant,’ Samantha asked him.

  ‘Especially then,’ Liam told her softly. ‘Oh, yes, most especially then.’

  It was perfect. Life was perfect. Their love was perfect.

  Liam was perfect. The perfect man, the perfect husband...the perfect father...and she loved him more than she would ever, ever be able to find all the words to say.

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  IS BN: 978-1-4268-4903-9

  THE PERFECT FATHER

  First North American Publication 2000.

  Copyright © 2000 by Penny Jordan.

  All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including xerography, photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, is forbidden without the written permission of the publisher, Harlequin Enterprises Limited, 225 Duncan Mill Road, Don Mills, Ontario, Canada M3B 3K9.

  All characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the author and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same name or names. They are not even distantly inspired by any individual known or unknown to the author, and all incidents are pure invention.

  This edition published by arrange
ment with Harlequin Books S.A.

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  Document Outline

  Title Page

  The Crighton Family

  Cast of Characters

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Copyright Page

  Table of Contents

  Start